humanitarianism

You know your country has a checkered past when you find yourself sitting around pondering the humanitarian upside of sticking with the British Empire.

O my mighty sisters and brothers, forget not that the ideal of humanity is the search of truth. In this pursuit, countless souls have sacrificed themselves in the past. And in this pursuit, countless more shall need to sacrifice themselves.

Sacrifice everything that is yours, to call up the humans in others.

Arise O lion-heart! Awake, O great soldier! Misery has come upon the world. It is wailing for help. It is wailing for redemption. Won__ you do anything, my friend!

To help yourself, help others; to help others, help yourself.

Compassion without discipline is egregious self-sabotage.

Sometimes, a war saves people.

War can condition a person to be resilient, tolerant, dependable, strong, and capable of so much more than one who had experienced nothing of it; it can bring out the very best in us, but also the very worst. Where is it, I ask, the proper conduit through which a soldier should be raised from whence they would become an upstanding citizen of the world, instead of a single country?

Today we are less likely to speak of humanitarianism, with its overtones of paternalistic generosity, and more likely to speak of human rights. The basic freedoms in life are not seen as gifts to be doled out by benevolent well-wishers, but as Casement said at his trial, as those rights to which all human beings are entitled from birth. It is this spirit which underlies organizations like Amnesty International, with its belief that putting someone in prison solely for his or her opinion is a crime, whether it happens in China or Turkey or Argentina and Medecins Sans Frontieres, with its belief that a sick child is entitled to medical care, whether in Rwanda or Honduras or the South Bronx.

Life is short. Life is uncertain. But we know that we have today. And we have each other. I believe that for each of us, there is a place on the frontlines.

I am no God. I am no Messiah. I am no divine incarnation. I am but a human in the service of humans.

We both know that I will not come. We both know that he won't be in Canada. There will be another earthquake, another flood, another war, another reason to not go where we think we are going. It is a strange life, this. Chasing human misery around the planet. We are not the sort of people who go where we say we are going.

Whereas Jesus and his disciples were distrusted by the state largely because they respected the poor and shared everything, the fundamentalists of the present hour would appear not to know that the poor exist.

Medicine, as we are practising it, is a luxury trade. We are selling bread at the price of jewels... Let us take the profit, the private economic profit, out of medicine, and purify our profession of rapacious individualism... Let us say to the people not 'How much have you got?' but 'How best can we serve you?

For so many years, the official propaganda machinery had denounced humanitarianism as sentimental trash and advocated human relations based entirely on class allegiance. But my personal experience had shown me that most of the Chinese people remained kind, sensitive, and compassionate even though the cruel reality of the system under which they had to live compelled them to lie and pretend. Pg. 409

Politically, he was a humanitarian who did know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. He was constantly defending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his Communist enemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope.

And most importantly, the next time someone asks you "Who are you?" you must answer in this simple way, with sincerity and conviction: "I am an Earth Citizen

A humanitarian seldom makes a good lover. For a lover__ world revolves around their lover, while a humanitarian__ world revolves around the world.